Take Me with You

During the spring of my fourteenth year, I ran away from home. On a cold night in early February, I disappeared into a Kansas snowstorm. My family lived outside Kansas City. For much of our time together, Dad preached at Edwardsville Christian Church. We lived in the parsonage, a two-bedroom box just south of the railroad tracks separating the white and black parts of town. As the Civil Rights movement heated up, Mom crossed the tracks whenever she could. For that, and for other indiscernible reasons, Dad beat her.

My story begins during America’s Civil Rights movement, a time when my family fell apart and my future became a struggle between parents and ways of life. Much of my struggle took place within my father's house.

In running away, I found a new life. But I wasn’t alone. My journey also marked a rebirth for mom and for Jefferson Jackson, the black Baptist preacher who became my father and who raised me. Together, we lived in hiding and in poverty. From that beginning, I’ve risen to the highest levels of international charity, serving as senior vice president of World Vision U.S. and vice president of PATH before joining Global Impact as CEO. Take Me with You delivers a first-person narrative of a boy who found his future by running away. My childhood and escape from abuse has influenced my present work and driven a personal inspiration to leave a lasting mark on humanity.

Today, as the CEO and President of Global Impact, I’ve made a career of trying to stop cycles of abuse, racism, and inequality. I'm the sum of my story, this memoir rooted in love, faith, and moral courage. Take Me with You is one boy’s story about choosing love, forgiveness, and the charity within—and about choosing to be positive.

Take Me with You is a call to action to help those in need, especially children. As the statistics reveal, there is an alarming need both in the United States and throughout the world:
• In 2013, 14.7 million children under the age of 18 were in poverty in the America
• More than one in three African American children live in food-insecure households
• Today, nearly 18,000 children under age 5 will die of mostly preventable causes, such as diarrhea, malaria, and pneumonia. This translates to more than 6.5 million per year
• Globally, nearly half of under five deaths are attributable to undernutrition
• Globally, 51 million under-five-year-olds were wasted (malnourished) and 17 million were severely wasted in 2013
• 4 in 10 children fail to meet minimum learning standards worldwide
• Each year, between 2000 through the present, there have been at least 10 million children under age 18 who had lost either one or both parents to AIDS
• In 2013, 4 in 5 deaths due to malaria were in children under five

I hope that my story will inspire you and encourage you to do whatever you can to change a life for the better. All children—whether in the United States or in third-world countries—deserve to have a fighting chance in life. You have the choice to live your life in a way that will change another person’s life for the better, and maybe transform your own along the way. Go ahead, make your mark.

Scott Jackson

Global Impact President and CEO Scott Jackson has worked and traveled from New York to New Delhi, from Washington, D.C., to Dakar, Senegal. His international relief and development efforts have taken him to remote villages in Africa and Asia, to the heart of the Holy Land, and inside some of the most powerful institutions and governments around the world. He’s worked in more than sixty countries, met four U.S. presidents and worked with their administrations, and represented international development issues with the offices of U.S. Secretaries of State Madeleine Albright, Colin Powell, and Hillary Clinton.

Before joining Global Impact as CEO in October 2011, Jackson worked in senior posts for World Vision U.S. and PATH. During his early career, he served as assistant to a U.S. congressman and founded an international trade consortium. Before that, he picked strawberries to help feed his family.

In 1992 and 1996, Jackson served as part of Bill Clinton’s Washington state campaign. In 1992 he held the role of finance director. In 2004, he became a founding member of The ONE Campaign executive committee. A year later he traveled to Uganda to raise awareness about war criminal Joseph Kony. The people Jackson met during that trip moved him deeply, none more than the child he’d first seen on a display board at a World Vision sponsorship concert five years earlier. Scott’s relationship with Simon would continue to change both their lives for years to come.